Marc [Thiele] emailed me a few weeks ago to ask if I thought my talk would be appropriate to close the conference.

„Marc,“ I told him, „my talk is perfect for closing the conference! The first half is this incredibly dark rant about how the Internet is alienating and inhuman, how it’s turning us all into lonely monsters.”

“But in the second half, I’ll turn it around and present my vision of an alternative future. I’ll get the audience fired up like a proper American motivational speaker. After the big finish, we’ll burst out of the conference hall into the streets of Düsseldorf, hoist the black flag, and change the world.”

Marc said that sounded fine.

As I was preparing this talk, however, I found it getting longer and longer. In the interests of time, I’m afraid I’m only going to be able to present the first half of it today.

„Why we should be celebrating the rise of robot journalism instead of criticizing it — Tech News and Analysis – "The harsh reality is that much of what appears in newspapers and on websites is not the kind of ground-breaking, investigative or analytical content most people think of when they hear the term “journalism.” Some of it is pedestrian content about sporting events, earnings reports, news releases, calendar events, city council meetings and so on. Wouldn’t it be better if we could automate some of that and free up reporters to do other things?“

„That’s not really my thing“ I said. Then he pouted, comically and even adorably: „But I made it just for us.“

So I drank it and it was a bit sharp but really delicious, like tart watermelon.“You can hardly taste the gin“ I said.

„What gin?“ „You said there was gin.“

He laughed. „I said G.“ He meant GHB, gamma-hydroxybutyric acid, commonly known as the date-rape drug. Later came several more druggings, as he held Gatorade up to my limp lips with who-knows-what mixed in. I spent the weekend — about 60 hours — semi-conscious and didn’t leave his apartment until Monday morning. Sometimes I think I never left his apartment, that someone who merely looks and sounds like me walked out.“

"Daily Briefs are distinct and friendly, “like a smart, knowledgeable friend telling you what’s going on in the world,” says Davies. That means not taking yourself too seriously. The subject line, for example, always contains a preview of what’s to come in the body of the newsletter and mentions various topics with different degrees of seriousness."

U.S. Tech Companies Have a Lot at Stake in Ukraine | Re/code – "Ukraine’s IT sector is impressive. As one of the country’s largest industries, IT in Ukraine is a key component of its future economic success. Today, the volume of exports of software service and development from Ukraine is about $2 billion annually. By 2012, there were more than 4,000 IT outsourcing companies in Ukraine, and the sector was growing 25 percent year over year; economists project that the $2 billion industry will grow 85 percent over the next six years."

Faking Cultural Literacy – NYTimes.com – "It’s never been so easy to pretend to know so much without actually knowing anything. We pick topical, relevant bits from Facebook, Twitter or emailed news alerts, and then regurgitate them. Instead of watching “Mad Men” or the Super Bowl or the Oscars or a presidential debate, you can simply scroll through someone else’s live-tweeting of it, or read the recaps the next day. Our cultural canon is becoming determined by whatever gets the most clicks." Und außerdem: Draufklicken und das gif ansehen

Everything Is Broken — The Message — Medium – Ein Text über IT-Sicherheit, der auch Laien wir mir die Problematik deutlich(er) macht: "Software is so bad because it’s so complex, and because it’s trying to talk to other programs on the same computer, or over connections to other computers. Even your computer is kind of more than one computer, boxes within boxes, and each one of those computers is full of little programs trying to coordinate their actions and talk to each other. Computers have gotten incredibly complex, while people have remained the same gray mud with pretensions of Godhood. Your average piece-of-shit Windows desktop is so complex that no one person on Earth really knows what all of it is doing, or how."

„Between 75% to 80% of the videos that Netflix users end up watching on the service come directly from the company’s recommendations about what to watch next. To put that another way, just one fifth of the content viewed on the site is from users visiting Netflix and choosing to go through the steps of typing out the name of something they want to see. The better the suggestions Netflix can make, the more videos users will stream, and the more customers will want to continue paying for the service.“

„Her monumental success with the release may also be an indicator that the direct-to-consumers model, the same one that startups like streaming services VHX and ebooks startups like Emily Books are using, can create increasingly viable and sustainable businesses. Beyoncé’s album is currently only available through iTunes: People had to pay for the content and download it in order to listen to it. And many, including myself, didn’t hesitate to buy it, and those of us who did are not disappointed. The digital-first release didn’t compromise the quality or the originality of the album — it’s one of her best releases to date. The demand is there if the experience is new enough and original enough.“

„So if 2013 has brought us two powerful reminders of the market failures of high quality and public-service journalism in the digital age, then what might we expect for 2014? Economically strapped and disheartened after years of losing ground, leading news organizations might finally begin paying more attention to what the public does and deliver services and products to meet it where it is at. But what is it that the public wants and what will be the consequences of catering to their preferences?

(…)

But what does the public want? The answer is again two words: straight news. A concise and straightforward rendition of the main facts is the format of the majority of the most popular stories in the sample, with feature-style storytelling coming in a distant second place.“

Last weekend I build my first application with Ruby on Rails (you can do that at home, too, with this guide). Users can write down an idea with a headline, some text and upload a picture. All this functions are basically built with one line of code. This is amazing!

Although I sometimes use the terms ‘minimal’ and ‘simple’ as if they were interchangeable, by definition, minimalism actually refers to the paring down of elements to get to the essence of a thing. This doesn’t mean you practise minimalist design simply by removing ornamentation; it means you ensure that every part of the design works together to the point where nothing else can be added or removed to improve it. It’s not easy to do well